Cool!! Well now I know!!
And I had posted about nanosaur before in another thread but yes, we played the heck out of those games back in the day.
I was in high school when the Game Boy Advance SP came out, and I was so excited about it that I had one pre-ordered and everything (I also worked at EB Games at the time, so I guess I was drinking the kool-aid lol).
I distinctly remember being in class with the kind of desk that had an opening for your books and stuff in the front, and just SPin' away right there during class. I believe it was one of the Castlevania games, but it might have been Ninja Five-O (which I owned, and stopped owning when I traded it in at EB Games - a tragedy).
There was one other kid in my class, a "cool" kid, with whom I'd never really talked before, but when he found out about that SP I had, he got real excited. Somehow, from that point on, and all the way up to graduation, he and I would shout "SP! SP!" at each other whenever we crossed paths.
High school boys are dumb.
earliest games I played at school:
oregon trail, math blaster, commander keen, sticky bear. I discovered a cheat in math blaster and my teacher thought I was a genius because I got perfect scores on multiplication and division in kindergarten.
last game I would play at school: pokemon heart gold. got my entire senior year class into it
somewhere in between kindergarten and senior year: I played it all during class. I had a hacked PSP and a gameboy micro. I flunked out because my MS/HS in Florida was the worst. I ran away to california and finished all my courses online. At that time we played Street Fighter Alpha 2 using MAME on an iMac during class.
Calculator games were huge in the early 00s at my school. Phoenix (basically space invaders) and Block Dude (mentioned above) were favorites of mine. Drug War too of course, which is basically like Sim City with drugs. You had to trade games with a connector cable, something kids learned how to do with Pokemon trading. Teachers would assume you‘re working so students had them out and in front of their faces during lectures. At this time they never would have guessed you could play on such a small machine. Can’t imagine how many hours I put into Phoenix
Our catholic school was loaded with Apple II/e's and had the usual educational software like Number Munchers. The other big one was Where in Time is Carmen San Diego. Also there was a disk passed around that had Mario Bros.
Later on, a few PC's had been moved into the library, and I had gotten my own at home, so I snuck a few shareware games on there, so Wolf3d, Keen, and Jill of the Jungle were played a bit.
In high school, emulators were just coming into the scene, so I had a floppy I'd carry into computer class, and I'd play NES games during the time I should have been doing my schoolwork.
I‘m still in school! But we have it tough! Flash is dead, and practically every html5 game site is blocked (they suck anyways though (except itch)). They even blocked archive.org, so no Megaduck or arcade games. What they didn’t block was a chrome extension that has a few (mediocre, but functioning) emulators. Specifically Boxxle and the Gameboy version of Sachen's Ant Soldiers are some I play.
@NoJoTo I'm not suggesting you actually do this, and take zero responsibility for any issues that may arise if you were to try and be discovered… but depending on exactly how your school has implemented their blocking, you may find it enlightening to read some articles around SSH tunnelling.
As a kid who graduated high school in the US in the mid 00s, the ride from elementary to middle school was one that coupled with updates to the computers at the back of the classroom and in the computer labs. My experience was nearly completely Mac-based, with different preinstalled or shareware titles, and some software actually purchased for our usage. It surprises me how well I can recall these different games, even those I’ve not looked up since.
I could go on at length about this class of game, but I’ll just share one for now.
**Squirrel Kombat**
A 2D platform fighting game about squirrels fighting each other with _blood particle effects._ Deep middle school ‘XD so random’ energy, with a surprising variety of special combos that are all broken in unique ways. The title card for the developer ‘Monkey Farm Software’ was precisely in line with the ethos. I can’t recall where this came from - maybe a macAddict software CD? Back computers in the science class in middle school. Figuring out how to juggle the com opponent in the most extreme fashion. Good shit.
https://youtu.be/Ec3Gow1_y2w
What nonsense did you get up to on the school computers?
similar age range I reckon, Macs in our school for junior high (1998-2001?) and a keenly interested computer lab guy - I can‘t remember the name of it but we often made our own games in what I remember to be a version of HyperCard but not quite HyperCard - basically point and click games. One kid who was good at drawing made a violent point and click “game” with the apple voices, etc. The school also had a floppy disk Sony Mavica that we managed to borrow on a class trip, taking pictures and using them in our games. I wish I could remember the name of the app now - something card. I feel like someone mentioned it on these here forums, or another forum I’m on. Something tells me that these servers were not backed up. The kid who was good at drawing‘s password was ’assword.'
Otherwise, finding out that some of our teachers had Quake demo installed/networked was huge for us as well. Mostly other kids played "stick death" (???) and the macromedia Flash game "Snowcraft" - I was hooked on that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V30jCJgpArY
Our school was really fast at blocking sites with games, so it was always an arms race with kids determined to play Quake or whatever. Me and my friends didn‘t bother with that but we would do wikipedia/imdb races where we would start on one topic and have to click hyperlinks to get to the destination and see who could do it fastest. It must have been a common thing because I’ve seen it come up as wordle clone variants.
One friend of mine would always get stoned during our free period and play [the falling sand game](https://boredhumans.com/falling_sand.php) which is mesmerizing
I was in middle school, 2001-2004, and we had a huge computer lab with PCs in it, a stark contrast from the iMac and older macs from elementary school.
The PC labs had a preinstalled Atari game pack on them and at the end of class, we got the opportunity to play whatever we wanted for a few mins. I got super into DigDug and Centipede. I got pretty good at Centipede IIRC.
This is going to be relatable to like two people including myself, but we had Unisys ICONs in Ontario in the early-mid nineties. Incredibly niche, and it turns out not well preserved, so I can't find footage of the build-a-bird game I would always play on them in the lab. (lmao, it was literally called “Build-A-Bird”!!)
A friend of mine did a vlog on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grewa1BxTOM
Later on we got Win95/98 machines and played Yukon Trail on them, probably also a Magic School Bus game. My friends would install DOS emulators like No$ and Nesticle which would always mystify me, a lowly Mac user. We'd also "play" Kid Pix a lot, if that counts (I think it should).
We also had iMacs throughout high school c. 2000-2004 but I think we mostly watched flash animations on them like from Stickdeath. I had a friend at the time who was a big PC gamer ask me about Avernum once, but I wasn‘t into WRPGs at the time so I couldn’t help him.
I've wanted to make a Mac gaming thread for the longest time but I'm worried I don't have enough to say on the subject, actually!! Just make jokes about Bugdom????
I'm so happy this is still playable.
i‘m still in school! we have google’s chromebooks, which aren‘t really capable of running software, unless you count html files. most sites that let you play games in browser are blocked, to a surprising extent (sylvie is blocked! i wouldn’t expect anyone in charge of some blocklist to know about her!); heck, even the settings app is blocked! luckily, archive.org isn‘t blocked, along with all it’s in browser emulators, so i generally play that. most people who want to play games have their own methods, though.
oh now that the threads have been merged this seems redundant uh oh well
wait now i've actually read it and that is completely different to right now? huh... my memory is really bad
Real heads know
https://cdn.toucharcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/lemon_stand_21.jpg
https://classicreload.com/sites/default/files/qbasic-gorilla.png
Christ I am old
My second grade teacher had a lot of good computer games that he would let us play during breaks and stuff. Zany Golf was my favorite for sure.
https://youtu.be/ou_tlbrcX-A
Hell yeah. We had so many icons (probably the Unisys ICON 2) at our grade school in the mid to late 90s. Well beyond the use by date. The most popular games were Cross County Canada, Lemonade Stand, and Northwest Fur Trader. I wonder if there are any emulators for it? We had a few macs in the school too.
In high school it was PCs all the way. The internet was more accessible, so it was a lot of early web games on Candystand.com.
I played whatever I could fit on a floppy disk and did so with absolute impunity because I was a catastrophically cool preteen right before I became a completely insufferable and fat teenager who designed their own accidentally racist tabletop game about anime cyborgs and evil nazi wizards. Still, the late 90s and early 2000s were a pretty cool time to be a reasonably smart kid.
On the same disk I would keep a copy of my ongoing ~(~(lesbian vampire fiction novel)) which I rarely showed to anyone, and was essentially unopposed by the authority until I tried to monetize my skills by carrying a set of emulators and cracked copies of _Doom_ and _Wolfenstein_. Perhaps I was crossing the line that separates normal children from those who are _too cool_ for school.
I remember for a hot minute in elementary school, Nanosaur was the computer lab game we all wanted dibs on (maybe it was only installed on some of the computers? I can't remember why it was hard to get any time with it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvmByXPbF2I
High school was the age of NANACA CRASH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkzmYj8mjUg
My favorite aspect of the Yukon Trail was how effectively the cup game and target shooting games in the first Alaska town after to ship voyage simulated the reality of the many people who arrived and likely squandered their resources before the actual trip. Very seldom did any of us actually bother to go past that town.